Queer|Art|Film: Alexander Chee presents ANOTHER COUNTRY

Join us as we kick off our Fall season with presenter—fiction writer, poet, and journalist—Alexander Chee! Our special guest host for the evening is visual artist and 2017-2018 Queer|Art|Mentorship Mentor, Neil Goldberg, who will moderate the Q&A alongside QAF co-curator Adam Baran.

“Convention outraged...a class abandoned...a country betrayed!” Julian Mitchell’s 1984 film ANOTHER COUNTRY stars Rupert Everett and Colin Firth as outcasts united in a battle for truth and honor at an all-boys boarding school in 1930s England. Loosely based on the youth of real-life spy Guy Burgess, the film made a deep impact on tonight’s presenter—fiction writer, poet, and journalist—Alexander Chee. Inspired by Everett’s portrayal of a young man who lives in full possession of his sexuality and is unwilling to “play the game”, Chee says, “the film set me on fire to live openly as a gay man, to fight for what I believed in, and to make art that reflected this.”

As always, our screening will be followed by drinks and discussion at Julius Bar (159 West 10th St. at Waverly), the oldest gay bar in New York City!

ALEXANDER CHEE

Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in February of 2016. He is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and an editor at large at VQR. His essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Tin House, Slate, Guernica, NPR and Out, among others. He is winner of a 2003 Whiting Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in prose and a 2010 MCCA Fellowship, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak. He has taught writing at Wesleyan University, Amherst College, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Texas – Austin. He lives in New York City, where he curates the Dear Reader series at Ace Hotel New York.

ALEXANDER CHEE ON ANOTHER COUNTRY

“ANOTHER COUNTRY was my first gay film, and it set me on fire with, well, desires of various kinds—for Rupert Everett and Cary Elwes, certainly, but also to live openly as a gay man, to fight for what I believed in, and to make art that reflected this. It's a very subtly made film about love, power, politics and sex, and I think it is one of those works that illuminated the entrance to the path I ended up on as a writer—ANOTHER COUNTRY gave me a glimpse of how a work of art could do all of this.”